Bryn Mawr
Classical Review 94.08.03

Conference: The FUTURE OF THE BOOK

"Ceci tuera cela!"
"This will kill that!" So said the 15th century archdeacon in as he
brandished a printed book in the direction of Notre Dame cathedral in
Victor Hugo's novel (while the hunchback was elsewhere engaged). The idea
that new technologies threaten long-held cultural and social values was
heavy in the air at a conference on "The Future of the Book" held 28-30
July 1994 in the fortified town of San Marino overlooking the sweltering
plains and hills of northern Italy. Several speakers quoted the
archdeacon's words, and they returned as a mantra in the final remarks of
the conference's star speaker, semioticist and novelist Umberto Eco. Eco
acted out the anxiety of the present by holding up a paperback book, then
reaching under the table for his laptop computer and juxtaposing them as
the archdeacon had done with the book and the cathedral.

For one
who has often attended meetings of librarians and publishers gathered to
discuss the practical implications of new publishing and communications
technologies, it is thus a rare treat to participate in an event where
scholars step back and ponder the meta-issues: what do the new
technologies mean for our society, how do they alter the character and
nature of knowledge and cultural memory, does technology determine the
ways in which we communicate, or can we shape the way in which technology
works for us? This meeting, sponsored by Rank Xerox and the Institute for
Semiotic and Cognitive Studies of the University of San Marino, presented
a dozen academic papers to a meeting of some 50 people in a setting that
fostered formal and informal discussion. Unlike many of the
future-oriented meetings of recent years, this one featured no in-lecture
demos, no Internet connection, and little attention to the obsessive
real-world issues of platform independence, copyright, cost-recovery, or the
like. The focus was cultural and theoretical.

Several speakers
addressed the literary prospects of hypertext in one way or another: Jay
David Bolter of Georgia Tech was theoretical, Michael Joyce, already a
veteran hyperfiction author, was more venturesomely poetic, and George
Landow of Brown University linked their themes. Will the author
disappear? Will the reader disappear? Will hypertext be better understood
as the system within which reading takes place as we all link from
document to document, or will individual creations with pre-formed links
take a dominant role? Perhaps most striking was the confidence with which
all agreed that in hypertext we have a new way of handling text somehow.

Venerable questions of predestination and free will bubbled
beneath the surface as well. Many speakers, e.g., Carla Hesse of the
University of California (noting ways in which idealistic dreams of a
future of free discourse quite comparable to those of
the Internet were common currency among eighteenth century philosophes),
Raphaele Simone of Rome (concerned about a return to pre-modern
"disarticulated" texts and consequent cultural incoherence), James J.
O'Donnell of the University of Pennsylvania (finding in medieval and
early modern navigators of similar cultural transitions a ground for
venturesome pragmatism as a model), and Paul Duguid of Xerox PARC, all
vigorously denied any determinist leanings, insisting that whatever
transformations now occur
are not in the first or second instance matters of technology, but
matters of social choices made about institutional and cultural
structures. Just how those choices are made and how far they are
susceptible to rational control were questions debated repeatedly through
the conference. By contrast, the one rank optimist was Patrice Bazin of
the municipal library of Lyon, using experiments there to envision the
"meta-lecture" of the future; Luca Toschi, associated with the
universities of Verona and Florence, was the closest thing to a "techie"
in the group.

Duguid was joined by Regis Debray, the veteran
theoretician of Latin American revolution from the 1960s now reincarnated
as a "mediologue," in strikingly conservative warnings about the
consequences of the "demassification" or "dematerialization" of the
physical artifacts by which culture is borne. Debray in particular warned
that as societies have looser and looser ties to places and things, they
may find themselves subject to reactionary forces grasping for old
certainties at least as brutally as do Balkan or fundamentalist Islamic
peoples today.

In fact, the speakers were strikingly conservative
in outlook, and it was as though a kind of reaction is setting in against
the prophecies of electrozealots. There was discussion in this vein as
well: how well do we prophesy? Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox, chief organizer
of the conference, delivered a paper entitled "Farewell to the Information
Age," making the interesting substantive point that we risk "naturalizing"
(i.e., taking for granted, as though they were natural givens and not
artificial cultural products) many of our conceptions when we make such
predictions. He showed an old Popular Mechanics cartoon of the housewife
of c. 2000 doing her housework by spraying her waterproof living room
furniture with a garden hose. His point was not only that
the prediction was wrong, but that its biggest mistake was in assuming
that the "housewife" with her perm and poodle skirt would still be the
same in 2000. So too, Nunberg, argued, information itself is hardly a
natural resource but a carefully created and nurtured form of cultural
artistry, and he convincingly showed the true rise of the information
culture to lie in 19th century mechanism and atomization, driven by
business and journalism. What lies beyond, he implied, is much harder to
know with certainty than our easy prophecies make it seem.

The
star of the conference was host Umberto Eco, and he made the most of his
position at the end with "conclusive remarks" in which he thoughtfully
drew together themes and made his own distinctions. For Eco, it was
important to emphasize that McLuhan was wrong at least twice: first, in
thinking that image would dominate alphabet in the new electronic culture
(alphabetic material is far more easily moved and manipulated on the
information networks), and second, in thinking that electronic technology
would usher in the intimacy of a global village. Far more likely, says
Eco, that solitude will be the problem of the new age. He offered
well-constructed insights from contemporary Italian life of the power and
influence of new ways of thinking, while at the same time cautioning that
old cultural expectations will continue to control the choices that
societies make. Hypertext he welcomes cannily, the Internet he welcomes in
principle (though to this eye he seemed to be speaking of a culture he has
not yet inhabited), but he still does not see where and how the role of
"publication" will be fulfilled in an e-world that for him more closely
resembles the samizdat of late Soviet authors denied formal access to a
wide public.

Will the book disappear? This was the red herring
question of the whole conference, for though it seemed to be an implicit
expectation, all speakers and discussants were at pains to insist that it
will not. What emerged to this library-formed participant most strongly
was that it is the scholars and authors who have the most fixed and in
some ways narrow conception of the book as vehicle of culture. Though
speakers were strikingly anxious to maintain a place for the book in
culture, it was clear that the book they care about takes up only a small
space on our library shelves and forms only a small part of the flooding
output of printed matter that emerges today. Here it seems that the
library community is already far ahead in considering the multiplicity of
forms in which information already comes and will increasingly come. Seen
in that light, this was a conference not so much on the Book and its
Future as on the Idea of the Book, in many ways a more fragile and
threatened artifact than the Book itself.

The one part of the
future of the book most confidently predicted is the appearance of the
conference papers in hard covers sometime in 1995.